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The shrimp welfare project

How to help thousands per dollar

I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was “oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.” The reason it seems crazy is because of bias; shrimp look weird and we don’t naturally empathize with them. If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. They communicate, integrate information from different senses into one broad pictures, make trade-offs between pain and various goods, display anxiety, have personal taste in food, and release stress hormones when scared.

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